Localize, don't just translate: prices, proof and forms

A page translated without a single error can still feel foreign. The price shows in a currency the customer does not pay in, the webinar date reads backwards, the form rejects a double-barrelled surname, the time of a meeting does not say which country it refers to. None of these is a translation mistake, and all of them cost enquiries.

Localizing means adapting these elements to the reader’s country. This article goes through them, in the order in which they cost the most when forgotten. It extends our articles on website translation and opening new markets.

Prices: currency, taxes and payment methods

The price is the first thing readers check, and the first thing that gives away a page that was merely translated. Google says it plainly to those who show their products abroad, in its Merchant Center help on languages and currencies:

Three decisions follow:

• The currency displayed: the one the customer will pay in, with a rounding rule to avoid long, odd amounts. We detail that choice in multilingual and multi-currency store: where to start.
• Taxes: a price including tax for a consumer, excluding tax for a business, depending on the country’s conventions and what you sell. The rules are checked with your accountant.
• Payment methods: a card is not enough everywhere. In the Netherlands, for example, Stripe presents iDEAL | Wero as a common payment method that goes through the customer’s bank, and announces its migration to Wero during 2026 and 2027. A local payment method is checked country by country, and followed over time.

Proof: what customers recognise

A customer review, a reference, a phone number: what reassures in one country does not necessarily reassure in another. CSA Research, which surveyed 8,709 online shoppers in 29 countries, reports that 73% of them want at least product reviews in their language.

• Reviews and testimonials in the reader’s language, and if possible from their country.
• References the reader can recognise: customers, partners or media from the market, if there are any. If there are none yet, do not invent them: an honest page about your arrival in the country is worth more than proof that rings false.
• Contact: a way to reach someone who speaks the language, and opening hours expressed in the country’s time.
• Legal and policy pages: terms of sale, shipping, returns and legal notices in the language, adapted to the applicable law.

Forms: names, addresses, phone numbers

A form designed for a single country silently blocks the others: the request never arrives, and nobody knows why.

The W3C, the body that sets web standards, devotes a whole page to personal names around the world. It advises asking whether you really need separate fields for given name and family name, rather than a single “full name” field, and avoiding the labels “first name” and “last name” in non-localized forms: they confuse people who write their family name first.

The same reasoning applies to the rest:

• Addresses: the order of the elements, the position of the postcode and even the existence of a region change from one country to another. A required field that does not exist in the customer’s country blocks the order.
• Phone numbers: a country code, and validation that accepts foreign formats.
• Characters: a name with an accent, an apostrophe or a non-Latin alphabet must pass validation.
• Error messages and confirmation emails: translated like the rest, they are often forgotten because they only show when something goes wrong.

Dates, numbers and time zones

Formats go wrong without a single word being mistranslated. The W3C page on date formats sums it up: the month, day, year format is unique to the United States, most of Europe writes the day first, Japan starts with the year, and Thailand favours the Buddhist calendar.

Plurals deserve a line of their own. In English, a counted noun has two forms, singular and plural; other languages have more. The rules of the Unicode CLDR, the reference used by most software libraries, give Russian three forms depending on the number: 1 день, 2 дня, 5 дней (one day, two days, five days). A template that writes “{n} days” the same way for every number will be wrong in Russian for a good share of them.

Time zones follow the same logic. A meeting, a webinar, an order cut-off time or support hours are written with their time zone, and ideally also show the reader’s own time. Delivery times, finally, depend on the public holidays of the destination country, not those of the shipping country.

The words themselves: units, examples, tone

Localization also touches the text. Units of measurement, clothing sizes, worked examples in euros, references to a national holiday or a season: what speaks to a French reader may mean nothing to an Australian reader, for whom December is summer.

Slogans and headlines need more than a translation: a rewrite in the language, by someone who writes it, sometimes called transcreation. That is the work of a translator or a native writer, and it is where a machine, however good, helps least. The choice of terms is fixed once in a brand glossary, and sentences already translated are kept in a translation memory. For the rest of the text, translating your website with AI, automatic or reviewed says which pages to review in full, and DeepL, Google or an LLM how to choose the tool.

In what order to localize

1. 01Price and payment.

   Currency, taxes, payment methods: whatever blocks the purchase comes first.

2. 02Forms and emails.

   A lost enquiry cannot be recovered.

3. 03Formats.

   Dates, numbers, plurals, time zones: coded once, valid everywhere.

4. 04Proof and policy pages.

   Reviews, contact, terms in the language and adapted to the country.

5. 05The texts that sell.

   Headlines and offer pages, rewritten by someone who writes the language.

The site structure follows: one URL per language, internal links that stay in the reader’s language, and correct hreflang tags. A client learned this the hard way: on an online plush toy store we are putting back on its feet, 712 internal links written without the language prefix sent every Spanish reader to the French pages. These mistakes are detailed in the hreflang mistakes that cost the most.

Where to start

Open your site as a customer from the target country would: place an order or send an enquiry from start to finish, with a name, an address and a phone number from that country, and note every place where the journey hesitates. That is your localization list. The cost of this work belongs in the budget of a language, which we detail in website translation cost: per word, per page, per market. For a catalogue, translating product pages for export applies these rules field by field.

To walk through that journey with us on your first market, describe your site and the target country: we start from the purchase or enquiry journey.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Google Merchant Center Help, supported languages and currencies (new tab)support.google.com
2. Stripe, iDEAL | Wero documentation (new tab)docs.stripe.com
3. CSA Research, Can’t Read, Won’t Buy, 2020 (new tab)csa-research.com
4. W3C Internationalization, Personal names around the world (new tab)w3.org
5. W3C Internationalization, Date formats (new tab)w3.org
6. Unicode CLDR, language plural rules (new tab)unicode.org